


The Slayer

by jeeno2



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: AFFC spoilers, ASOS Spoilers, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Future, F/M, Gilly POV
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-14
Updated: 2014-01-14
Packaged: 2018-01-08 17:51:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,212
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1135657
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jeeno2/pseuds/jeeno2
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He finds his courage.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Slayer

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the tumblr Game of Ships Ghost Ships challenge back in October. The prompt invited authors to put their characters in a setting with paranormal creatures. I decided to put Sam and Gilly with Coldhands and a bunch of White Walkers. :)

Gilly can tell right away that this crow is not like any of the others who’ve sheltered here over the years.

Most of the crows are coarse, horrible men who curse and spit.  Some are missing teeth.  Others, a finger or two.  And almost all of them try to grab at their tits or arses while Craster’s and the old Bear’s backs are turned.  Even the pregnant girls like her.

But not this crow.  This one’s eyes are kind.  His voice is gentle.  Timid, even; like he’s not only scared of Craster but of the other crows as well.

Gily wonders if he was highborn, before.  His hands look soft, and he’s too fat to have ever gone without for very long.  She guesses he was some southron lord’s son.  Perhaps the son of a knight.

Either way, it doesn’t matter.  Gilly doesn’t even know his name but she quickly decides that out of this lot, he’s her only hope.

“Please,” she begs him.  His eyes go round as saucers when she clutches at his cloak, like he’s afraid of her too.  “If this babe’s a boy…”

She starts to cry.  She explains her situation between sniffles and sobs. She tells him about the living dead men with the bright blue eyes. 

He pats her shoulder awkwardly and promises to help.

“Wait right here,” he urges.  He looks and sounds so earnest that she dares feel a flicker of hope.  He runs off to talk with another young crow, his friend.  The one with the dark hair and scowling face.

But the scowling crow shoves the nice one away from him and starts shouting.  Gilly cannot quite hear what he’s saying, but whatever it is cannot be good.

When the nice crow walks back to her a moment later the look on his face tells her everything she needs to know.

After he tells her there’s nothing he can do for her, she wails and pleads with him.  She offers to fuck him, to be his wife.  She clutches at her swollen belly and cries some more.

The nice crow’s eyes have tears in them too.  But he can’t help her.

 

* * *

Gilly is dozing with her new babe when everything changes.

There’s a single shout from the other side of their thin curtain.  The sound of breaking glass.  And then a short moment later the world is nothing but deafening chaos.

Gilly’s son startles awake and begins to cry.  She shushes him and does her best to soothe, nursing and rocking him even as her own body shakes in terror.

At length a gloved arm yanks aside the curtain that hides them.  Gilly looks up and it’s him again.  The nice crow from before.

He looks terrified.

“Please! Come with me,” he urges.  “We must go now!”

Gilly looks over his shoulder and into the main room of her home.  She sees Craster’s broken, lifeless body, lying in a crumpled heap in the center of the room.  The old Bear lies next to him; he isn’t moving either.

And she looks on, in horror, as her sisters are beaten and raped by a dozen other crows.

Her son starts screaming inconsolably. Gilly looks up at the kind crow’s face, panicked.

“What do we do?” she asks him hoarsely, desperate.

“Please, Gilly,” he whines.  “There’s no time…”

Gilly looks into his pleading eyes again.  She closes hers.  Squeezes them shut tight, tries to make the nightmare things she’s just seen disappear.

She reaches out and blindly grabs at his hand.

Wordlessly, the crow pulls her and her son out of the chaos and into the relative safety of the dark night.

 

* * *

Gilly has never felt safer in her life than she has in the past three hours.

She knows it’s foolish to feel this way.  They are nothing but a man, a girl, and a babe, alone in the freezing wilderness.  They have nothing to protect them from the terrors of the night save a few dull daggers and a bit of queer-looking glass that Sam calls _dragonglass_.

But Sam is so doting and kind.  He takes care of them in a way Gilly’s never been cared for before.  That first night he asks her, over and over again, if she feels well enough to continue.  She isn’t used to that at all, and it makes her blush.  When they do finally stop for the night he makes certain she and the babe are fed and comfortable before eating anything himself.

Craster never thought of anyone but himself.  There’d be many nights where he’d stuff himself silly with food and drink while she and her sisters went to bed with hungry bellies.

Sam’s nothing like Craster.  He’ll make a wonderful husband.  When Sam climbs into the furs with her that night she silently promises to be the best wife to him that any man has ever had.

He rolls over and looks right at her.  She smiles at him.  He’ll take her now, she guesses.  But instead of it being horrible and rough like it always was with Craster it will be gentle and sweet and good.  Just like Sam.

But to Gilly’s surprise, he doesn’t take her.  He doesn’t even kiss her.  He rolls away from her, yawning loudly.

“When we get to the Wall I’ll send word to my family,” he says quietly.  “My mother would never turn you away, I know it.  In the meantime, I’m sure you and the babe can stay at the Wall as long as you need to.”

He’s asleep and snoring softly before she can even make sense of what he’s said.

 

* * *

The next morning Sam wakes with the dawn, hard as a rock against the back of Gilly’s thigh.

She smiles to herself.   _Now, then_ , she thinks.  She rolls over and embraces him.

But he pulls back from her immediately, looking horrified, as if her body were something toxic.

He can’t look her in the eye when he tells her, stammering and red-faced, that he’s keeping his vows.

He does his best to avoid her for the rest of the day.  Every time he ignores her questions it feels like a fresh slap to her face.

 

* * *

They come to a deserted town that second night.

“Whitehall, I think,” Samwell says, consulting a bit of parchment.  He sounds confused.

“They’ve all gone south,” Gilly explains.  “Else they’re dead.”  Most likely they’re dead, she figures.  Or worse.

The first wight finds them around nightfall, just after she’s put the babe to bed and she’s outside gathering firewood.

“Get inside!” Sam shouts at her as it lumbers towards them.  He has the queer-looking black glass in his hand and he waves it at the horrible walking dead man with the bright blue eyes.  He jabs it threateningly at the empty air between them.  “ _Now!”_

Gilly doesn’t want to leave Sam alone out here.  She’s never seen anyone fight a wight without becoming one himself.  But she _must_ protect her son.  And so she does as Sam bids her and runs back to the house and her babe.

She watches through the front window, terrified, as Sam tries to fight the wight off.  He drives the dragonglass into its chest.  But that does nothing at all.  The wight picks the glass out of its body like it’s a wooden splinter and tosses it aside.

Sam grunts loudly in frustration. He runs to their dying cooking fire and plucks out a burning plank of wood.  Sam howls in pain as the fire scorches his hand.  But it doesn’t stop him.  He waves the burning wood in front of his body and then hurls it at the wight with all his strength.

It lands on the wight’s head.  The wight immediately begins to burn up from the inside out.  It drops to the ground, twitching as the flames consume its body.

Sam – her strong, brave Sam – runs back towards the house.  Gilly throws open the door for him and pulls him into her arms, so thankful the wight is dead and that he’s still alive.

Sam winds his arms tightly around her and crushes his mouth to hers, whimpering.  She cries out in surprise.

They tumble together to the floor, the plush carpeting cushioning their fall.  In an instant they are nothing but a fevered tangle of tongues, teeth, and limbs.  He snakes one hand down between their bodies to cup her breast.  She moans into his mouth.

“Gilly,” Sam mumbles against her lips.  He presses a line of open-mouthed kisses down her neck and nips at her skin.  All of this is new to her.  It feels like her body is on fire now, too.

 

* * *

When the dead man with the covered face and the cold hands pounds on their door a few moments later Sam makes a strangled yelping noise.  He jumps up and away from Gilly.

“I’ve just chased off four score more wights,” he says without feeling.  As though he's just told them it’s cold tonight, or that he thinks it might snow.

As the man talks, Sam adjusts his clothing, his hair.  He flushes beet red and asks the dead man smart questions about what just happened outside.

It’s soon obvious to Gilly that this dead man just saved their lives. But he stinks of rot and filth and decay, and he scares her.

 

* * *

The dead man travels south with them.  Gilly doesn’t want him to.  Not at all.  She doesn’t care that he keeps the other wights away.  He’s no less terrifying during the daytime and his stink makes her son cry.

But Coldhands, as Sam calls him, says there’s something he needs on the other side of the Wall.  And neither she nor Sam knows how to say no to him.  Gilly isn’t certain they even _can_. 

They quickly fall into a strange routine.

Every morning they rise at dawn.  Sam and Gilly break their fast alone.  (Coldhands never eats.  Not ever.) After breakfast Gilly nurses the babe while Sam tries, and fails, not to stare at her bare breasts.  She pretends not to notice his gawking.  But she secretly likes that he wants to look at her body.

Then they ride south without rest until the sun sets.  The dead man’s elk is powerful and strong and they make good time across the snow-covered fields.  

Every night, Coldhands stands watch by a low fire about a hundred feet away from them while Sam, Gilly, and the babe settle down to sleep. And every night, once they’re settled and comfortable inside their furs, Sam tells Gilly the exact same thing.

“My vows,” he says, sounding pained, looking over her shoulder and not at her face.  “I can’t break them anymore, Gilly.”

He always goes on for a bit after that about honor and the Wall and such.  But she never really listens.  After he finally stops talking she kisses him, hard, right on the mouth.  He whimpers and, wrapping his arms around her, he kisses her back.

There’s never any more talk of vows or honor after that.

 

* * *

But in the end, after everything, and no matter how much Gilly begs him to join her, to be her husband, Sam still leaves her to face Horn Hill on her own.

“I love you, Gilly,” he tells her earnestly as they lie together their last night on the ship that brought them all the way from the Wall.  “And I want you.  Always.  So much.”  He buries his face in her breast.  “But I can’t.”

She can hear the heartbreak in his voice.  He doesn’t want to do this.  He doesn’t want to leave her.

Gilly tries to change his mind that night the only way she knows how.  But it doesn’t work.

 

* * *

Lady Tarly is just as warm and welcoming to her as Sam said she’d be.

When Gilly arrives on their doorstep, baby Aemon in her arms and the babe she will name Samwell in her belly, Lady Tarly gathers her into her arms.

“Welcome, my dear,” she murmurs into her ear, as though she’s known Gilly all her life.

Samwell’s mother eagerly takes the napping Aemon from her.  She coos and babbles at the boy like any doting grandmother would.  She has a housemaid show Gilly to what will be her new bedchamber.

“Just until something more suitable can be made ready for you, dear,” she assures her.

Gilly does not like lying to people.  Craster would beat her whenever she told untruths, and she winces without meaning to whenever she does it now.  Especially when she lies to nice people like Lady Tarly.

So she’s glad that telling Lady Tarly that the babes are Sam’s bastards was at least half true.

As Gilly lies in her comfortable new bed that night she covers her still-flat stomach with her hands.  She says a silent prayer to the Seven --Sam's gods -- to keep watch over him as he studies in Old Town.  She prays that her sons grow up to be strong, brave Tarly men, just like their father.

And because she really is a selfish girl after all, she prays that someday the strongest, bravest man she has ever known will leave Oldtown, leave the Wall, and come home to her.


End file.
